ΕΑΝ ΠΡΟΤΙΜΑΤΕ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ ΠΑΤΗΣΤΕ ΤΗ ΣΗΜΑΙΑ ΣΤΟ ΚΑΤΩ ΜΕΡΟΣ ΤΗΣ ΟΘΟΝΗΣ
When war is used to justify the retroactive purification of culture, history itself becomes the target. Music, language, and memory are punished for surviving political borders. Identity is not defended—it is surgically erased. The Ukrainians removed Tchaikovsky’s name from their institutions. What is the next step? Removing the “Swan Lake”, the “Sleeping Beauty”, and the “Nutcracker” from repertoires? How callous and insensitive a regime can be?
By Helleniscope’s Editorial Team
Recent decisions by Ukrainian cultural institutions to suspend or remove performances of Russian composers, including Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, have been publicly defended as symbolic acts of wartime distancing. According to reporting by Reuters and The New York Times, these measures are not mandated by a single national ban but arise from coordinated policy shifts in state-funded orchestras, theaters, and broadcasters, aimed at excluding Russian cultural figures from official programming. Taken together, these actions amount to a deliberate cultural purge—widely interpreted not merely as protest, but as a further callous step toward identity elimination, in which history itself is treated as an adversary.
This is where cultural defense turns into cultural self-harm. The exclusion of Tchaikovsky is not an act of resistance against missiles or tanks; it is an act of retrospective purification, punishing art for political associations imposed long after its creation. In doing so, Ukrainian institutions are not confronting Russia alone—they are repudiating a civilizational inheritance that long predates the present conflict.
One or two centuries ago, the cultural, religious, and linguistic landscape of the region did not conform to today’s rigid national categories. The word Ukraine existed, but primarily as a geographic designation, not as a modern nation-state identity. Language, faith, and elite culture formed a continuous East Slavic space, not rival civilizations locked in opposition.
The foundational moment of that shared space occurred in Kiev in 988 AD, with the Christianization of Rus’. From that moment forward, Orthodoxy, literary tradition, and political culture developed without a meaningful civilizational divide between what are now labeled “Russians” and “Ukrainians.” To impose contemporary nationalist borders retroactively onto this past is not historical clarification—it is ideological projection.
Yet modern policy increasingly treats this shared inheritance as contamination. The Russian language, spoken natively by millions of Ukrainian citizens across generations, is being systematically removed from education, media, and public commerce. What was once an everyday, domestic language is reframed as foreign intrusion, regardless of lived reality.
This contradiction becomes especially stark when viewed through the figure of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who grew up speaking Russian as his mother tongue. The language now marginalized in schools and public life is the very language in which he was raised, educated, and professionally formed. A state that delegitimizes the native speech of its own head of government is not defending identity—it is disowning it.
Culture, however, is not a weapon. Ballet does not annex territory. Symphonies do not shell cities. When culture is treated as an enemy, it is not the past that is defeated, but continuity itself.
Wars end. Political alignments shift. But when a society systematically subtracts its own historical layers in the name of purity, what remains is not a stronger identity—but a thinner one. The actual cost of this callousness will not be measured on the battlefield, but in what future generations no longer recognize as their own.
January 1, 2026, n.stamatakis@aol.com www.helleniscope.com
DISCLAIMER: The views and statements expressed in this article constitute constitutionally protected opinions of this author.
Well, a decade ago Andrew Cuomo started culling all the Tsaikovsky swans in New York as an “invasive species”. Yes, they once graced every neighborhood park pond but we are now inundated with Canadian goose turd